canarytrap.net

So coming off the Luce days, a few things about internet + the world at large:

• The Open Net Initiative has released it’s annual review of filtering, surveillence, and info warfare. What’s particularly interesting to me as I glanced through it is how different regions filtered content. Some focused on content type (e.g. pornography), while others blocked sites due to certain events or types of sites (social networks, forums, twitter).
• An interesting piece by Byron Acohido suggesting the possibility that the Chinese government wasn’t behind the google attack isn’t definitive but does point out how quickly public discourse was to assign blame and depict China as a monolithic entity.
• Also very interesting is the summary of who’s writing about ICT (Information & Communication Technologies) for development by Ivan Sigal at Global Voices. Especially provocative are the observations regarding the challenges of reconciling development experts and ICT solutions and implementation.

• Speaking of groups typically overlooked by new media guru types — it turns out that blogging is on the rise amongst older adults.
• And speaking of neat stats and charts, a couple of pieces by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan in TechCrunch discusses the state of online video puts the emphasis on context in online video consumption.
• These read nicely next my CMS/C3 colleague Sheila Seles’ piece on why Apple hasn’t revolutionized TV (yet).

Finally, a couple of pieces contemplating crowd-sourcing:

• BBH labs asks where the agency ends and the crowd begin in terms of creative and strategic development. This topic is one that touches on a lot of conversations I’ve been having recently, not the least of which is a fan labor/virtual sharecropping discussion that’s been occurring on and off on the ROFLcon organizing list.
• Through the comments on the BBH piece, I came upon the work of Daren Brabham, including his short piece in Flow about crowdsourced advertising.
• Related to the issues of crowdsourcing and co-creation, Harvard’s Radio Berkman posted up a talk on the Failing Fantasy of Intellectual Property
• And to balance out the Cambridge set, MIT’s CMS Colloquium podcast tackles old/new media and “re-fashioning” with speakers Wayne Marshall and Joel Burges. Listen for the ultimate “hmmmmm” line: “how do we theorize time?”

I was all set to run a Globalization/Delight post to ease into the holiday weekend, but was instead blind-sided by this promotion for the latest LG Cyon phone — Black & White — in Korean markets:

In case you missed it: yes, that is two white people, one of whom is in full-body black paint. The print images accompany a video, which features the two models in various sensual poses and that strapline “a new skin.”

I want to keep my comments on this brief because it would otherwise turn into a very involved discussion of global media and constructions of difference. I would also preface my following remarks by saying that though this campaign is highly problematic on several levels, I would also not say that it’s unproblematically racist in that I think there are a lot of very complex and entangled issues surrounding race, nationality, multinational capitalism, sexuality and desire, and so on that would require unpacking. But for the moment I’m only going to talk about the part where it’s racist.

The blackface alone is racially problematic enough, but paired with the strapline of “a new skin,” it does a nice double whammy of both naturalizing whiteness (as what which is “underneath”) and suggesting that embodied difference (and the attendant structures of power involved) are a mere matter of “skin”. It is, if nothing else, rather efficient.

I came across this ad via this post, which makes very good points about LG’s multinational status, as well as the specious and patronizing nature of cultural-relativism arguments (ie — but it’s Korea, they don’t have a lot of black people/history of encounters with other races/etc). I do, however, disagree strongly on one point, wherein Turnbull suggests that we should give more weight to the fact that racism was not the central intent of the promotion:

“I’ve possibly lost sight of what was my intended main point, which is that while intent is not the only consideration in judging such an advertisement it is still probably the most important, and accordingly I’m at a loss as to how the Cyon advertisements could be construed as a deliberate attempt to demean Black people somehow, regardless of how much offense it may or may not generate: indeed, if that was the intention, then it could certainly have been done much more directly!”

I would argue that, quite on the contrary, intent is far from the most important consideration. Without delving into that whole world of death-of-the-author-reader-response, we should remember first that creations are not the same things as texts. Texts are what creations become when released out into the world, when meaning is made from them, in relation to historical condition, sociocultural contexts, and other texts. The creation — the ad — may not have been racist in intent, but the text it produced does not get off so easy.

But that aside, intent, in fact, is one of the great defenses of racist discourse. Intent is individual, racism is structural, and the ability to overlook the structural inequalities that are represented and evoked in favor of individual intentions is a form of racial privilege. In other words, racism isn’t a result of people trying to be racist, it is a result of people not understanding that they are being racist. The ability to dismiss racist symbolism because it was in some way “accidental” — which is to say a byproduct of structural power within a given historical context — is exactly how structural power works, by naturalizing its mechanisms and disavowing responsibility.

[This was originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog]

I’ve been thinking a lot recently on audiences and audienceship, and what it means for media audiences and the communities they form when being part of an audience can increasingly involve collaborating on the (re)production, distribution, and curation of content.

One of the sites that for me really begins to touch upon the participatory potential of new media audienceship is Viikii.net, a collaborative translation and subtitling platform for streaming video that distributes that tasks of translating television shows and other media from around the world across an entire community of users.

The site has been around since early 2008, but I stumbled across it last December, when I realized that fans were joining in a distributed labor network to subtitle a popular Korean drama that was airing at the time within hours of it being broadcast in Asia. The astonishing speed, as well as the decentralized collaboration system caught my eye and I’ve been talking excitedly about the site to people ever since.

The way Viikii.net work is that people can register for the site and contribute to subtitling uploaded video files in over 200 languages, line by line. Users can also edit and revise each other’s translations, refine the timing of the subtitles, or upload new files and put in requests for translations. The subtitles are added then and there, so that viewers on the site can see files even when they’re partially translated, so that you may come across a Korea drama that has had 80% translated into English, 30% complete in Spanish, and so forth. The video files are sectioned, so that people can contribute as much or as little as they want, much like a wiki for adding subtitles rather than general information.

The idea behind the site, according to the articles on the viikii blog was to help generate cultural understanding and language education through the use of popular media, since popular media was a means through which people could come to understand “not only language, but also the social texture that harbors it, the people who use it.” While this idea isn’t particularly novel, what makes viikii.net compelling is its radically collaborative and decentralized structure. Collaboration and decentralization of power and participation is one of the fundamental principles behind the found of the site as well:

“We people are who make, use, and live in all these languages; we built language, and so its barriers, which means that we’re the ones to tear these walls down. No super-power can do this alone, we must come together to do this, hail the potential of joined force! We already see wonders created by collaboration, made possible by WWW” (about viikii)

A significant portion of transnational media audience are no strangers to the phenomenon of fansubbing — amateur, fan-made subtitles for foreign media content. But even though fansubbing is undertaken by people who consider themselves part of the fan audience, it nevertheless creates certain social hierarchies within the community. More importantly, the flow of content is shaped by what content fansubbers decide to translate. Despite the significantly increased ease of fansubbing with digital technology, the time, technical skill, and resource commitment needed to fansub full episodes or entire television series in a timely manner still limited who could contribute.

Viikii.net takes the notion of “by us for us” behind fansubbing to the next level, opening up participation and lowering the barriers of entry significantly for anyone who wants to try their hand at helping translate, and shape the meaning of, the media content that they are consuming. By breaking down the units of contribution into single lines of dialogue, as well as creating a platform through which people could collaborate without having to even know one another, it has opened up the practice to a far wider range of participants, broadening even more — and for more people — what it means to be part of an audience.

[Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog]

This weekend, as some of you might know, is the 6th Media in Transition conference here at MIT. The theme this year is “Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission” and centers on question around the preservation, circulation, and migration of media between places, formats, platforms, and text and the cultural implications these changes carry:

What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture? What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies? How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct? What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private?

I will myself be speaking on transnational audiences and fan-driven circulation of East Asian television dramas on Saturday.

Though the bulk of activities begins today, the conference has its official launch last night, with a communications forum on Global Media featuring C3 consulting researchers Jonathan Gray and Aswin Punathambekar alongside University of Georgia professor Carolina Acosta-Alzuru and award-winning African filmmaker Abderrahamane Sissako, moderated by our own Henry Jenkins.

A few of the key points and provocations brought up during the panel:

Looking carefully at the flows of media circulation in addition to production and consumption, provides us with a new and important means to understanding media on a global scale.
Brought up by Aswin towards the beginning of the panel but echoed in different ways by all of the speakers, the importance of circulation as a site of media power was one of the central problematics discussed. The question of how media gets from one place to another, through what channels, at whose behest (or against whose wishes) reappeared in different forms throughout the talk. Aswin discussed the varied, criss-crossing flows of Bollywood content. Carolina’s discussed different national forms of the telenovela throughout Latin America and which ones travels with the help of or despite national governments. Jonathan described the almost entirely pirate-led circulation of VCD and DVD films in Malawi and how media circulation into spaces neglected by corporations due to their unprofitability forces us to rethink the temporality, as well as the spatiality of global media. And Abderrahamane linked the power of distribution, of being able to show and export your media, to representation. He suggested that the unevenness in the transmission of media perpetuated the cultural domination upon Africa because as a place that often receives media from the outside but does not produce and distribute its own images, Africa is constructed as a place that has no culture to share.

Not just a question of legal versus illegal circulation
Another key issue was that role of piracy in global media, since illegal distribution channels are often the only means through which much of this media can move. Aswin was first quick to point out that illegal/extralegal versus legal was a false binary, that in actuality the systems are far more complex and overlapping. Jonathan added that, in a case such as Malawi, piracy takes multiple forms, the first being that piracy is the only way to bring outside media in because there is so little profit to be made in Malawi that media corporations never address the area. The second is that piracy stops production of local media because it makes it incredibly difficult for Malawian musicians to make money. In the case of telenovelas, piracy can also be an act of resistance, when national governments crack down on the export of media through official channels. And in Africa, the routes of media circulation are so complex and it is often difficult to trace where any given film comes from. Ultimately, the false binary between legal and illegal circulation makes us overlook the fact that cultures of distribution are simultaneously cultures of production

Down with “industry lore”
Finally, coming out of a discussion of which genres of media circulate, the panelists warned against the trap of “industry lore.” As Jonathan points out in the case of Malawi, that even as general patterns emerge as to what genres and forms are popular, there are constantly exceptions to every rule. Thus we must be careful not to make too broad of generalizations about what audiences want to see and why based on assumptions and speculations.

Here then is part 3 of the full interview transcript with Seung Bak and Suk Park, the founders of the Asian Media streaming site Dramafever.This section deals with issues of audience measurement and engagement metric, as well as the challenges and opportunities licensed online video platforms face in light of the many unofficial sources of content out there.

Part 1 and part 2 of the interview are available, and the rest will be up soon.

And again, for an introduction to this case check here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Xiaochang: One of the big questions that always comes up is how do you measure audience engagement for advertisers?

Seung: Actually, that’s very easy for us. We have a video platform, so we know basically when people hit play and when they drop out. Mind you, all of our videos are pretty long, about an hour long each. And looking at all the aggregate stuff from traffic to date it was shocking. About half the people stay on until about the 90% of the video. On most video sites I think people drop off after about the first minute or so, but what we’re finding is that our drop off rate is very minimal, every 10 minutes 10% drop off, every five minutes another 2% drop off. We’re finding that about half the people are watching the whole episode every given time. So that’s just on the per drama episode basis and we’ll have to do more research but based on what we’re seeing now, our engagement rate is one of the highest on the internet from a video site perspective. These are very addictive dramas from what you’ve probably personally experienced.

Suk: When you talk about how do you measure audience engagement, what sort of advertisement are you referring to? Banners? Or TV ads? Or mostly online or other platforms?

Xiaochang: I mean, whatever you guys are using. Part of the question is just what sort of numbers are you presenting to your advertisers to tell them ‘this is the amount of people who are paying attention’ to your content?

Suk: It’s interesting because different metrics apply to different advertising platforms, so when you’re talking about impressions on a banner it gets tricky because it depends on the clicking of the banner and so forth. That’s when click-through rates when click through rates become a measure of ROI. When we’re talking about video ads, the conversation with the agency changes a little bit because although click-through rates are asked because they’re curious about what the regular click-through rates are, but what’s understood it that when these ads show up, 100% of the attention is focused on the ads. You cannot click forward, you cannot stop the ads, and if you want to watch the content — and 50% remain until the 95th percentile — you are watching the bulk of the ads. For branding opportunities, it’s as good as it gets in terms of getting attention and relate that particular advertisement to that particular audience.

Seung: Just to add to that, the way we’re distributing videos right now is pure streaming. This is not one of those things where you click play and you wait for the whole thing to download and you go away. Our site doesn’t work like that. It’s only streaming the bit of information you’re looking at at the moment, so if you click pause, that’s not getting accounted for in the engagement metrics. That’s why we’re very pleasantly surprised at the level of engagement that we’re having because these are long videos and to have 50% of the people stick through the end is pretty interesting.

Xiaochang: Where do you think the appeal of this content is for your audience? What makes Asian dramas, or Korean dramas, different from what else is out there?

Seung: I think for the most part, the stuff that we’re showing isn’t just any type of content. We’re curating some of the blockbusters from Korea, and certainly it’s heavily geared towards content that’s proven pretty popular throughout Asia. I think the common thread through Asian dramas and telenovelas and so forth is that it’s somewhat of a refreshing change from what you’re getting in American media. The story lines tend to be, for the most part, wholesome. They’re very engaging and it’s very linear — you can’t start from episode 24, you have to start at episode one and the story kind of pulls you in so that you watch the whole thing. The content itself has proven throughout the world that there’s tremendous appeal in it. What we’re proving here is that in the US where this content hasn’t been distributed in a way where the mainstream has been exposed to it and we’re hoping to be the platform that does that.

Suk: I would that it’s not that the content is better or worse. It is what it is. But we know that there’s a demand for it and we want to make it available in a legal way.

Seung: We had some initial assumptions before we launched our beta, and the whole idea was always to take information as we were getting it and be able to adapt and add new features. So when we lauched beta, we basically had one goal and that was to prove that there is a market for this by providing by far the best experience for viewing Korean dramas online right now. As you can see it’s pretty high quality. There’s almost no wait time. We feel pretty good about the results we’ve seen. It’s only been about a month and we’ve kept it pretty under the radar. We’ve only engaged the select sort of bloggers that cater to this audience. Very niche blogs. And while working with them, we got about 13,000 beta registrations within the first month, which is pretty good. And there’s an additional 20,000 – 30,000 people who came to our site who didn’t register and I think that’s the experience with closed beta in general. I think it shows that even with minimal marketing to date, and with a very small base of content, we were able to prove that there is a demand for all of this. I don’t want to extrapolate too much from a limited sample pool, but we’re getting lots of feedback from people and we feel good that this could easily spill over into somewhat of a mainstream audience based on what we’ve seen so far.

Xiaochang: If the does spill over into a mainstream audience, do you see it going on to some broadcast channels? Do you think will be different sorts of distribution channels for the content that’s not just online?

Seung: That could be. What our content licensers decide to do on their own is ultimately up to them. What we’re focusing on with Asian media companies is to offer them new audiences, to create a platform for them to monetize existing content. So we’re fundamentally web-focused. We want to create a destination site where people can experience the best content from Asia in an english-supported format so people can understand it.

Xiaochang: One of the appeals of sites like Mysoju and sites like d-addicts is that there’s such a wide array of content and this is one of the things that limited the rental circuit and certainly limited the broadcast channels in terms of limiting their audience, so where do you think you guys fit in with that? I mean, it does take time to get licensing deals and you can’t provide the range of content and be as responsive as the fansubbing groups who can turn around content in a day after it airs on TV in Korea.

Seung: That was one of our biggest concerns going into this. We started up the site with basically 10 titles. Even now we only have 14 titles and all of our titles are stuff that’s already been aired and a lot of people have already consumed it throughout the web. But in spite of the fact we have a very limited selection, we’re still able to get 13,000 beta registrations in month one. We’re getting consistent traffic everyday and we’re getting consistent feedback. A lot of this is people who’ve already watched the same content on mysoju but they want to watch it again. There’s also a lot of people who always felt a little weird going to an illegal pirated site, so they come to our site.

Suk: Your question is very interesting. There are other sites that have a wider variety of content, and immediate content that is broadcasting right now. How can we compete in that market? What Seung said it’s right — there are people who come to our site because of the better quality and because we’re a legal site. It’s exponentially harder to do things legally. The assumption that we made in the beginning, that we still hold to this day, is that going forward, maintaining these illegal sites will be harder and harder to do. From two different points: the first one is the advertising model. When you have an illegal site, you cannot bring direct sponsors to that site. You have to live by the advertising network that is willing to sponsor sites that infringe on intellectual property laws and so forth. The second one is that most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, they have to base a lot of their infrastructure on existing platforms. Mysoju loads all of their videos onto Veoh, youtube, etc. These companies also need to abide by much more stringent rules and regulations meant to protect IP, so if there is a site that consistently uploads material that doesn’t belong to them, it is their responsibility upon notification to take it down immediately.

Seung: I think Suk is addressing very good long term considerations that ultimately favor out business. You’re addressing very real concerns that we have, which is that we’re competing with these guys that basically have none of the hurdles that we face because they’re doing it illegally. But in the first month of our beta, we’re competing head-on with these guys. The illegal sites are still up and running, they’re running the same content that we have, and yet in spite of it we’re getting consistent traffic. And in fact, we’re adding new content every week and we’re noticing that every time we add content, we’re getting a spike in traffic. For all these reasons we feel pretty good that even though we’re at a competetive disadvantage when it comes to content selection, the simple fact that we’re offering an experience that is clearly superior to the illegal sites out there, that’s winning over an audience. And we feel that as we add more content, the audience will come, because they’re already coming with just 12, 13 titles.

[Screencap from hugely popular Korean Drama "Boys Over Flowers"]

Here then is part 2 of a multipart full interview transcript with Seung Bak and Suk Park, the founders of the Asian Media streaming site Dramafever. In this section, Seung and Suk talk about surprising audience demographics that reveal that the audience for Korean dramas might be more broad and more diverse in the US than previously imagined by the Broadcast networks.

Part 1 of the interview was posted last week. Keep an eye out for more of the interview in coming weeks as I get around to transcribing the recording.

And again, for an introduction to this case check here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Xiaochang: How did you go about approaching advertisers about this?

Suk Park: Advertising: it’s tricky. Right now, we’re using a bigger agency because our traffic is still small, being a closed beta. What we’re doing right now is we’re using the revenue from the Ad Network for the beta stage, and when we launch the full site later this year, we’re building direct relationship with the agencies and the advertisers to bring them in. We actually don’t need that many advertisers now because in the first couple of months the traffic won’t be that substantial.

Xiaochang: Along those lines, what do you tell your advertisers your target audience is? Who do you see as being the bulk of dramafever viewers?

Suk Park: That’s a great question because there’s current a couple of ways to analyze our current traffic. The licensing partners really care, as 40% of our audience is non-Asian. It’s a very easy way for individuals, without premium international TV satellite channel, or without having to go to sketchy Koreatown supermarkets to rent these DVDs, to access this type of content. So as a way of introducing their content into mainstream America, it’s a very low-risk offer for them.

Seung Bak: The current state of the market we found for the Korean broadcasters in this country is that their primary audience is basically Koreans, Koreans who are heavily geared toward the first generation. And their distribution, like Suk mentioned, are basically cable channels and supermarket DVD rentals. And here we’re coming out with this interesting concept and telling them that we’re going to take all the stuff they’ve already aired, to start with, and then we’re going to bring and introduce them to all this new potential audience, which is a very exciting prospect for someone like MBC. We’re talking about people who normally don’t consume this content, or if they do consume it it’s through illegal channels which they have no control over whatsoever. So one of the strongest value propositions we bring to the table is that we are broadening and expanding the audience in ways that they couldn’t in the current state. And as Suk just mentioned, we’re looking at the beta registrations and even we were somewhat surprised. We expected a lot of non-Koreans to sign up for this service, but I’ll say a very small minority are Korean-Americans, with the vast majority being other Asians and a lot of non-Asians.

Xiaochang: So the previous distribution channels seem to be limited in that they could only target what they already knew existed as an audience.

Suk Park: Now, mind you, because these are numbers based on a closed beta, there’s also a discrepancy with small numbers when we do any type of analysis. What’s interesting is that we can clearly assume that people who are registered for the beta are enthusiasts for this content. It turns out there was a lot of demand for this product outside of the first-generation Korean demographic, which brings us to what do we tell the advertisers? Our first iteration that was you would be able to brand yourself within the Asian-American population, or the Asian immigrant community in the US. And now we have upgraded to two basic concepts. One is the female audience — over 75% percent of the audience is female. So everybody who wants to attract a female audience, we would be a very good destination for branding and advertising. The second is an audience that we call Asian-content enthusiasts, but it’s an audience that watches international movies and international content outside of what would be classified as mainstream in the US.

Xiaochang: So you’re slightly changing the message to advertisers as you’ve seen a lot more non-Asian audience share come in, or was that the plan form the beginning that you would broaden it?

Suk Park: There was only a certain degree of what we could plan for from the beginning and a certain need for adaptability. We’re now adapting to what the reality is. The audience isn’t 90% or 100% Asian, it’s a wide spectrum of individuals. A lot of them female, that’s for sure, but a wide spectrum of age and race.

Xiaochang: Can I ask how you measure your audience?

Seung Bak: At the most direct level, we know how many people are registering and the information they use to register. Right now, we’re not asking people for a whole lot of info, just their gender and their birth date. But there’s a lot to be learned from the type of feedback they’re giving us and we’re getting a lot of feedback. And you notice that just by looking at names — and this is a very imperfect way of looking at it — but based on our sample, there are a lot of non-Asian last names in there. And even account for people having either been adopted, or interracially married and there’s still an overwhelming number. And we have a facebook group, which has around five hundred members right now, and if you look at the images of people who are leaving comments, we’re seeing caucausian ladies from the midwest. There’s a lot of non-Asian people in the facebook group as far as people writing on our walls. We’re still seeing a lot of Kim’s, Li’s, and Park’s, but they’re definitely in the minority.

[interviewer's note: this next bit is from a little later in the interview, but I decided to put it here for thematic continuity]

Seung Bak: We knew that there were a lot of Chinese and Filipinos and Asian demographics interested in this, but we really didn’t expect non-Asians to be big fans. We were hoping that we could get a lot of these people to watch this, but we were pretty surprised that even in the initial beta that there were people who you wouldn’t expect to consume this stuff who were actively consuming dramas. And they’re consuming dramas right now in a way where you kind of have to jump through hoops to watch them. Mysoju.com is a good example. I mean, these guys are blatantly ripping content left and right from every major Asian company out there, and if you notice they break stuff off into parts and if you’re watching something, there’s parts missing, the subtitles are weird, the quality is different because one part is on Veoh and another part is on Youtube and so forth. Yet people are still watching it. And there’s another set of people who are basically downloading through bittorrent. You click download before you go to bed and when you wake up you have a new drama to watch and then they go and find some fansub on a different site and figure out how to merge the two. So in spite of all these problems, there’s still a fair number of people who are consuming content this way. So the assumption was, what if you make this site very easy to use, what if you make it very high quality, and what if you just make the overall experience great. You could probably grab that audience and get more, and we’re starting to see some of that even at this very early stage.

So I have been lax on blogging lately because I am currently in the deepest depths of thesis crunch time, with some 80-100 pages to produce in the next three weeks. I do have a number of hopefully interesting pieces in the works, including one on hybrid and divergence economies that will be a deeper glimpse into some of the C3 work I’ve been doing that is sort of a follow-up to the post on the Fallacy of Free, as well as a rundown of the Transmedia as narrative entanglement and platform co-dependence presentation I gave while in Brazil.

In the mean time I thought I’d share the full transcript of my Dramafever.com interview from earlier this year. For anyone not yet aware, Dramafever.com is an ad-supported, fully-licensed online video platform dedicated to full-length Asian media content, in particular Korean TV dramas. For more details, I wrote an introduction to this case here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Part 1 of the full interview (which will run roughly 4 or 5 parts) focuses on how the company came to exist and the goals and motivations behind it, including the presence of a very visible and undercatered (at least, through authorized channels) audience.

Xiaochang Li: Can you remind me when you were planning on launching officially?

Seung Bak: It’s sort of a floating date right now, but we’re targeting end of Q1, beginning of Q2, so I guess around a March/April time frame. And the reason we’re in closed beta right now is to work through some kinks and develop some cool new features. We want to fully vet those things and have more content before we open it up so everyone can see it.

Xiaochang Li: Can you tell me about these ‘cool new features’ you’re planning on developing?

Seung Bak: Sure. Right now when we launched the beta, it’s essentially to make sure we get the core experience right — to put it simply: that you can watch dramas and [the experience] is high quality and enjoyable. And we for the most part accomplished that. Some of the features we want to build on are really to build on the experience. So you’re watching a Korean drama and you want to know everything about it, so there will be ancillary assets like pictures. You could have fun playing with, maybe with simple downloads, or you could add your pictures to pictures with actors. There’s also an opportunity to become an aggregator for news related to Asian entertainment that’ll help people save time and discover all these cool blogs that are out there that you would know if you spent all your time hanging out at Soompi, but which for the most part are sort of obscure. We would be a place that brings all of these good blogs to light and help people discover them. And there’s all kinds of stuff we could do around adding all this meta-data to dramas and actors and a lot of people could really engage in the storylines and really be able to discover new stories and really feel like they’re getting to know a certain celebrity. So, lot’s of ideas.

Suk Park: To add to what Seung said, basically we want to be able to create a community for people who enjoy this content as well as an information site for all the content relevant to the dramas, the actors, and so forth.

Xiaochang Li: So you guys see yourself as more of an Asian media content hub, instead of just a distribution platform?

Suk Park: Exactly. We wanted to build a place where you can watch the best of what Asia has to offer in terms of videos. We started out with kdramas, but it doesn’t have to be just kdramas. We’re going to get dramas from other parts of Asia, as well as other types of video content including TV variety shows and potentially movies and material related to music. And then we want to build all these tools for people not just to consume media but also have some fun on the site and be able to engage with other users.

Xiaochang Li: So what made you start out with kdrama?

Suk Park: So Seung and I met in college a long time ago — 1995, 1996—

Seung Bak: We’re both Korean, by the way.

Suk Park: And we always talked about doing something together. Because of our prior jobs, we had traveled across Asia and we noticed about two years ago that throughout East Asia — China, Japan, and Korea — and Southeast Asia —a lot of the Korean dramas were being played in prime time, either dubbed or subtitled. The Korean wave was taking over in a very obvious fashion. We came back to New York and we spent some time doing research to see if people in the US were consuming this type of content. And we saw the regular mediums: the television broadcasts, the DVD rentals, but it just didn’t seem like those were the only two distribution channels. We go online and we find about a dozen or two sites that feature this content, with very strong traffic numbers and every single one of these sites illegally using this content. My background is in international business and licensing so I jumped on a flight back to Korea to meet with the broadcasters, followed by trips bySeung and I to LA to visit the [Korean] broadcaster headquarters in the US and after going back and forth a couple of times, we were able to get the licensing for the for the dramas we have now.

Xiaochang Li: Can you give me a sense of when this was happening?

Suk Park: We went to China around the end of ‘07 and we started conversations with the broadcasters in the beginning of ‘08 which lasted for about eight or nine months before we signed the first contract.

Xiaochang Li: And why did you start out with MBC? And not KBS or SBS, for example?

Suk Park: Those guys were very forward thinking. They’re a group from LA. The other two companies were also very supportive of this idea. KBS is a little more cautious because they have to work within a strong hierarchy from Korea, and because they are government owned. MBC was really supportive and we were able to actually sign a contract with MBC to launch the beta site and move forward to the formal launch. From there we expect the other broadcasters to join us.

Seung Bak: We have active conversations with the other media companies right now. We just happen to have all the MBC stuff already done and prepared. But we’re going to be rolling out content from other sources throughout the year.

Xiaochang Li: So when you say that MBC was really forward thinking, what sort of reaction did you get when you guys first approached them?

Suk Park: There was a certain unfamiliarity with licensing for the online space. A couple of things we noticed with all the broadcasters were that everybody was struggling with online piracyand they were faced with serious doubt about the existing business model from cable and DVD rentals. Both of them were declining — television because the CPMs you get for television ads have been hurting badly and DVD rentals because it’s an obsolete form of consumption. We were able to address those issues with our business model, which presented to them a new revenue channel. Of course, by having a free product which is advertiser-supported and better than the existing pirated product, it becomes a strong weapon against piracy. That’s why all the broadcasters were actually very supportive of our model. The second question that came up though was “who the hell are you guys?” Because all we had was a powerpoint and a lot of passion. We had to prove to them that through our network of advisors and through our career history that we could pull this off. I managed the licensing aspect and Seung managed the operational aspect.Concurrently, I approaching and establishing a strong relationship with the licensing sources while Seung was building something that we could show them. And towards the end of last year we were able to launch the beta site and everyone was very happy with the results.

I’ve been a somewhat inconsistent updater since I started this blog and this is due almost entirely to the research vortex that has consumed my life, which is more commonly known as my MIT master’s thesis. As some of you may (or may not) know, a significant portion of my energies right now are devoted to project that looks at the circulation of Japanese and Korean dramas through fan-organized (and frequently unauthorized) channels as a way to talk about trends in globalization, the transnational movement of media, and emergent forms of audienceship and participatory practice.

I will be presenting some of the work very soon, both at a CMS internal review, and at Media in Transition 6. While a lot of the work may be a little too involved and theoretical to be of immediate use to most, I’m putting the abstract here in case anyone is interested.

It is commonly accepted that media and communication technologies play one of the most pivotal roles in the complex system of practices and developments broadly termed “globalization.” Similarly, the increasing speed, volume, and scale of transnational circulation has been one of the most dramatic shifts in the media landscape, creating what Appadurai has dubbed global “mediascapes” that are reshaping the way we understand audiences and cultural formation. While the rise of massive global commercial media enterprises lead to renewed vigor around discussions of the dominance of the “West” upon the “Rest,” the increasing portability, transmitability, and reproducibility of media has helped to generate a grassroots globalization often discussed in terms of diasporic media audiences and all the ways, formal and informal, authorized and unauthorized, that migrant populations circulate and engage with media from the “homeland,” create deterritorialized social imaginaries that transcend national boundaries and form complex hybrid cultural identities.
However, with the emergence of internet technologies and increasing participatory audience practices online, these mediascapes have now become networked. Increasingly, individuals are radically participating and collaborating in the selection, (re)production, and circulation of texts and images that shape the very social imaginaries they inhabit, making them not only collective, but collaborative, and opening the space up to greater range of motivations and practice that can no longer be sufficiently described using old models of diaspora or imperialism. How the increased visibility and complexity of transnational media flows and the audience practices around them complicate the models of diaspora and globalism. What new (hybrid) models emerge when we take into consideration the interplay between diasporic communities and fan communities and how do the circulation and consumption practices afforded by new media technologies inform, and can in turn be informed by, the conditions of diasporic media audienceship?

In examining the flourishing online fandom around the circulation of East Asian television drama, we may begin to address some of these questions. While more traditional channels of distribution targeting diasporic audiences are floundering, the popularity of these dramas through unauthorized fan networks has grown exponentially. Rather than filtering content based on a strictly diasporic audience target, these communities are formed around the content itself rather than a pre-determined motivation and are involved in every step of the distribution process, from subtitling and selecting content to the speed or torrent downloads and promotion. Within this space, a diverse range of audience conditions and practice — diasporic populations, fans, pop cosmopolitans — come into contact with one another simultaneously shape the types of content available which, in turn, shape the “community of sentiment” they inhabit. What results is a mash of hybrids that, rather than signaling a sort of unproblematic fusion, maintains the productive tensions and contentions, creating more amorphous, conflicted, complex systems of identity and community formation.

My purpose is not to undermine the significance of historical conditions in relation to media and cultural consumption, nor to replace discourses of diaspora and media globalization, but rather to ask how other models of participation and fandom might intervene and aid in describing audience practices that do not so neatly fit within any pregiven category or single axis of identity. From there we may begin to map some of complex social, technological, and textual entanglements of cultural negotiation in an increasingly global media age.

I’ve realized recently that I really do need a special category dedicated to the intersection of globalization and awesome. For the complex routes of global media flow occassionally spawn some of the many unexpected and strange (and I have add, because I’m a killjoy, not unproblematic) combinations. This past week, in particular, has been full of such surprises.

First was the discovery of the hugely popular Brazilian telenovela set in India, Caminho das Índias (Paths to India), which apparently features a “Portuguese pop song about sadhus” on it soundtrack. Then came the report about use of “Rising Sun” — a song performed by Korean super boyband Dong Bang Shin Ki (DBSK) — on the upcoming installment of the Fast and Furious franchise (though admittedly, the surprise here has less to do with the “global” element than the combination of car-chase action movie and, well, boyband).

But by far the most awesome and most surprising cross-cultural media pastiche was found in episode 97 of the Mexican telenovela, Mañanas es para siempre. In one scene, a character shows another their class photo from art school in Florence, Italy. The photo is a clearly photoshopped composite of random individuals, including one terribly familiar face:

For those who don’t follow Korean Pop music, that’s not just any other random Asian dude, that’s actually “Xiah” Junsu, of Korean Boyband and Asian supergroup, DBSK (And, not to mention, the star of two of my absolute favorite mobile phone ad campaigns — Samsung Anyband and Samsung Haptic Scandal). Whether the product of a fortuitious google image search or a stealth fangirl on the production crew, this is one of the most unexpected global media cross-overs I’ve ever encountered.

View the clip of the scene here.

Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium

Last week I introduced Dramafever, a new content-distribution and community platform dedicated to bringing Asian entertainment content to the US (currently in closed beta) that is posing some interesting questions about engaging niche audiences in an increasingly global media landscape. This week, I had a chance to sit down for an informative phone conversation with the Dramafever founders, Suk Park and Seung Bak, about their goals, their tactics, and how they’re negotiating the space between fan communities and commercial interests.

Expect the full interview transcript in the near future, though for now (and for those of us pressed tight for reading time), after the cut is a brief summation of some of the stand-out revelations on how to approach established communities, unexpected surplus audiences and the broadening appeal of Asian entertainment, and what the future holds for global media flows online.

Asian Drama and Audience Engagement
One of the most provocative and compelling finding Park and Bak shared from their early data, was the fact that there was an unexpectedly large proportion of Asian drama fans and site visitors who were not of any sort of Asian decent. When the two first developed the idea for dramafever.com — they had noticed the enormous popularity of Korean dramas throughout Asia and in parts of the rest of the world, but there appeared to be a gap in the US market, where a majority of licensed Asian content (with Anime being a notable exception) was being distributed predominantly on premium satellite television stations and ethnic grocery stores. Even after taking stock of the flourishing online communities around the unauthorized circulation of Korean and Japanese dramas, they had expected their audience to be primarily Asian-American, and heavily Korean due to their currently all-Korean content and positioned themselves to advertisers accordingly.

What they discovered was that nearly half of their subscribers and fans were not of any discernible Asian lineage, and that the audience for Asian media was far broader than what the limited targeting of broadcast channels and grocery-store rentals suggested.
This finding, though preliminary and not strictly scientific, given the limited numbers of beta-subscribers (estimated around 13,000), fits in line with much of what I’ve found in my own research, regarding the much more ambiguous and diverse audiences in Asian drama communities that cannot be addressed by broadcast channels that target audiences based on a predetermined demographic. Furthermore, it suggests that online platforms are an ideal means to “test the waters” of new national markets and build a following for content without large capital investments, much in the way that unauthorized fan circulation of Anime in the 80s and 90s primed the market for its present mainstream popularity.

Community Relations
One of the seemingly obvious and yet refreshing tactics taken by Park and Bak when launching the project involved extensive familiarity with and observation of some of the central hubs of distribution and discussion around Korean dramas. They realized quickly that there was vast amounts of information available in terms of what dramas were popular with English-speaking audiences and why — they simply had to pay attention.
As a result, they’ve built a philosophy around being open with their audience, and highly responsive, listening to and soliciting suggestions from their users and from existing discussion forums.

Moreover, they seem to have taken on the controversy of monetizing fansubbed content in a straight-forward and thoughtful manner. The problem that other sites have faced with fansubbers, they suggest, is that they’re not in open communication with fansubbers when their fansubbed content is uploaded. The fact that these sites then make money from that content then exposes fansubbers to legal risk, without any consent or benefits on the part of the fansubbers. Dramafever.com seeks to avoid these problems, which often stir up bad blood between distribution sites and their audience base, by not only having licenses for the content (thereby negating the legal risk), but also opening up negotiations with fansubbers from the very start in regards to compensation and use of materials.

The future of global content
When asked about where they fit in between struggling satellite TV stations with their premium prices and limited content and fan-organized drama communities able to offer an immense range of unauthorized content, the pair stressed sustainability and quality as goal. They point out that unauthorized sites are wildly popular in part because they are filling a very real market need that wasn’t being seen to by licensed distributors. In comparing the situation to American mainstream media before readily available legal download sources like hulu.com, apple, and netflix, they suggest that the audience will follow the availability of content and the quality of experience.

“Even though we are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to of content selection, we’re offering an experience that’s clearly superior to the illegal sites out there that’s winning over an audience,” Bak says, noting that they’re already seeing consistent traffic even in the closed beta stage, with significant spikes whenever there is new content uploaded.

More to the point, they suggest that these illegal distribution sources might not be sustainable in the long run. Not only does their unauthorized status prevent sites like mysoju.com from developing major sponsor relationships for revenue, “Most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, have to base their existing infrastructure on existing platforms” says Park. As a result, as sites such as Veoh and Youtube crack down on IP violations, content is lost, creating inconsistent user experiences.

Ultimately though, as much of what we discuss at C3 has shown, the audiences aren’t just getting content from any single distributor. “I think if you just look at the web in general, it’s not a zero-sum game,” says Park. Emails from viewers and other observation suggest that people who have already seen dramas from one site will watch them again on dramafever.com, thanks to the quality of video and the ease of use. “We’re not trying to become d-addicts or mysoju or these other places where people are hanging out. We’re trying to compliment the overall ecosystem of Asian entertainment consumption in this country.”

The future of global content
When asked about where they fit in between struggling satellite TV stations with their premium prices and limited content and fan-organized drama communities able to offer an immense range of unauthorized content, the pair stressed sustainability and quality as goal. They point out that unauthorized sites are wildly popular in part because they are filling a very real market need that wasn’t being seen to by licensed distributors. In comparing the situation to American mainstream media before readily available legal download sources like hulu.com, apple, and netflix, they suggest that the audience will follow the availability of content and the quality of experience.

“Even though we are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to of content selection, we’re offering an experience that’s clearly superior to the illegal sites out there that’s winning over an audience,” Bak says, noting that they’re already seeing consistent traffic even in the closed beta stage, with significant spikes whenever there is new content uploaded.

More to the point, they suggest that these illegal distribution sources might not be sustainable in the long run. Not only does their unauthorized status prevent sites like mysoju.com from developing major sponsor relationships for revenue, “Most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, have to base their existing infrastructure on existing platforms” says Park. As a result, as sites such as Veoh and Youtube crack down on IP violations, content is lost, creating inconsistent user experiences.

Ultimately though, as much of what we discuss at C3 has shown, the audiences aren’t just getting content from any single distributor. “I think if you just look at the web in general, it’s not a zero-sum game,” says Park. Emails from viewers and other observation suggest that people who have already seen dramas from one site will watch them again on dramafever.com, thanks to the quality of video and the ease of use. “We’re not trying to become d-addicts or mysoju or these other places where people are hanging out. We’re trying to compliment the overall ecosystem of Asian entertainment consumption in this country.”

Some thoughts as Dramafever develops
The platform, of course, is still in development. They’re working out some bugs and implementing community-oriented interactive features. A couple of things on my wishlist as they move forward:

– Ability to share and embed clips and images taken from the videos, and easy screenshot tools to use while watching in order to facilitate what are known as “pimp posts” and recaps (like this one for the Korean version of Boys Over Flowers) that play a significant role promoting content.

– Places for fans to add their own self-created ancillary content: recaps, reviews, fanvids, fiction, etc.

– Tools or interfaces to schedule viewings with friends to share the experience, and possibly collaboration with services such as the open-source Boxee that Sheila just posted about recently.